News Corp. and NBC in Web Deal — In a long-anticipated challenge to YouTube and other online video sites, two big media companies yesterday announced a new venture to showcase their own programming across the Internet's biggest Web sites, as well as a new jointly owned Web destination.

Here Comes Competition, Apollo — The official developer release of Apollo, a platform that lets developers run their web applications outside of the browser, offline and on the desktop, is less than a week old, and they already have competition. — Firefox 3 will allow sites to work offline by accessing local datastores.

Joyent Slingshot [22] — Joyent Slingshot allows developers to deploy Rails applications that work the same online and offline (with synchronization) and with drag into and out of the application just like a standard desktop application. We have Joyent Connector and a select group …

Apple TV rocks — I bought an Apple TV tonight. — I've watched Ask a Ninja, Rocketboom, my show, and Ze Frank on it so far. — Works as advertised. Easy to setup. It rocks. — It makes me want to put out a high res version of my show. But, it's pretty watchable, even at the low resolution it is.

AppleTV Surprises And Impressions — Minutes after they were announced on January 9th, we at Rogue Amoeba ordered two AppleTVs to test out. Just as we extended and improved the AirPort Express with Airfoil, we're evaluating what we can do for the AppleTV. Today our AppleTVs have finally arrived and I've been testing them out.

Where Is Microsoft Search? — Its stumbles on the Web could open the door for rivals to come after its core business — Time has always seemed to be Microsoft Corp.'s (MSFT ) ally. In the company lore, the software giant takes three cracks at a market before establishing supremacy.

So who will get the story? — I wasn't surprised that my recent column on the need for newspapers to charge for online content drew heated reaction from cyberreaders and bloggers. — What did surprise me was the sense of entitlement many of these people exhibited when it came to benefiting …

The Apple TV screensaver is hot — Sure, everyone is looking inside the Apple TV and at it, but check out what it does on screen when it's twiddling its thumbs and waiting for you to command your library! Now I don't have mine just yet; it's still hanging out in a local FedEx distribution center …

Belgian company loses lawsuit against Google — ServersCheck contends that Google's Suggest points to pirated versions of its software — A Belgian court dismissed a lawsuit filed by a company that said a feature for Google Inc.'s search engine offers up password-cracking tools and serial numbers to unlock their software.

LH Top 10: Must-have Firefox extensions — If ever a software application was built to be more than itself, it's Mozilla Firefox. Over the past 2 years we've tried, loved and posted dozens of feature-adding extensions for our favorite web browser. But today we have the master, grand daddy list of 10 must-haves.

Microsoft temporarily closes video site — Microsoft is closing its video-sharing site, Soapbox, to new users for up to two months so it can create better safeguards against pirated content. — The software giant, which agreed earlier Thursday to distribute movies and TV shows for big media companies …

Hands-on with Hi-Tech Wealth's solar powered S116 — We had the opportunity to check out HTW Electronics' S116 at CeBIT, and good golly, it's real! For an estimated 400 to 500 dollars, this solar powered device can be yours as early as next month — that is, if you live in China — and potentially late fall in Europe.